Bob Dylan Once Again Captures the Spirit of our Changin’ Times

Bob Dylan's new 17-minute opus, "Murder Most Foul," is a reminder of a more innocent time and the national grief that seemed to linger for years. (Photo by Christopher Polk/Getty Images for VH1)

As thousands die all around us, Bob Dylan now delivers a musical lament about a single death that once seemed more than America could bear.

The new offering, “Murder Most Foul,” takes us back to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas nearly 60 years ago. The song is 17 minutes long. Sitting in our homes, in our isolation and anxiety and uncertain future, we have plenty of time on our hands to listen.

The modern plague, the coronavirus, haunts us the way few things have since the events of Nov. 22, 1963. In that era, Dylan was starting to become the voice of a generation. His songs seemed a kind of journalism, such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They are A-Changin'” and “Like a Rolling Stone.”

Now, unanticipated, at 78, with a Nobel Prize under hisbelt, he’s released his first original song in roughly a decade. That alonemarks it as a cultural milestone. But it’s also a reminder of a more innocenttime, and the national grief that seemed to linger for years.

“Murder Most Foul” is Bob Dylan’s first original song in more than eight years.

The song, slow and mournful, sounds like a funeral dirge.The lyrics read like a pop culture inventory of an era, like an old manremembering familiar names that comforted us before so many things in America startedgoing to hell.

The Beatles are in there. They arrived only weeks after Kennedy’s murder. But Pretty Boy Floyd’s in there, too, and Thelonious Monk and Patsy Cline, and Buster Keaton and Marilyn Monroe and Nat “King” Cole. That’s always been Dylan, pulling in random pieces of his surroundings to make whole cloth.

But Kennedy’s assassination’s the heart of it. He writes:

“The soul of a nation been torn away/And it’s beginnin’ togo into a slow decay.”

Actually, by most measures, the lyric’s wrong. It wasn’t“slow decay” America suffered back then so much as fast and furious convulsion.

Vietnam divided the nation. The civil rights struggle intensified and then lost its leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to assassination. Rioting followed in scores of cities. Then, Bobby Kennedy was murdered. The war dragged on. There were riots on college campuses around the country, and in Chicago outside the Democratic National Convention.

Bob Dylan, circa 1965 (Photo prov)

John Kennedy’s death seemed to set off so much of it. Itseemed a belated end to the placid, controlled, post-war 1950s and thebeginning of something else, something out of control, a whole new set ofnational rules, starting with the weekend of Kennedy’s murder.

We never left our television sets. And this, too, set off a new kind of ritual: televised grief therapy. We’ve seen it repeated across the years, following more assassinations, and the Challenger explosion, the bombing of Oklahoma City, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Now once again, we’re glued to our television sets, where we see the body count of the deceased rise daily. The days will become weeks and months. Kennedy’s killing took only an instant.

But the grief stayed with us so long that Bob Dylan could release a song about it nearly six decades later, and it still brings back that haunted hour.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” has just been reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

You May Also Like
Dr. Scott Rifkin: The Dilemma for Jews
Joe Biden

When it comes to concern that President Biden's support for Israel is wavering, look at actions not words, writes Jmore Publisher Scott Rifkin M.D.

A New Era for the O’s
Jackson Holliday

Even the great "Earl of Baltimore," Earl Weaver, never had a lineup with as much raw talent as the 2024 Orioles team, writes Michael Olesker.

Praying for the Hostages in Gaza and the ‘Whole House of Israel’
livestream of the Shema broadcast from the Western Wall

The Acheinu prayer reminds us that the deeper we go into the experience of those suffering, the more fervently we will pray for their speedy redemption, writes Rabbi Dr. Eli Yoggev.

Global Village
Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg talks to the Beth Am audience before playing his guitar. (Photo by Jim Burger)

Despite technological strides, human beings still need to interact and be in close proximity to each other, writes Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg.